


hold my body down

by orphan_account



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Angels, Gen, i don't watch preacher so obviously no knowledge of that show is needed, this was inspired by a gifset from Preacher
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-21
Updated: 2016-07-21
Packaged: 2018-07-25 20:04:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7546039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sarah said: “Go to Hell, Helena!”<br/>So Helena went.</p>
            </blockquote>





	hold my body down

**Author's Note:**

> Beautiful angel  
> Pulled apart at birth  
> Limbless and helpless  
> I can't even recognize you  
> \-- motion picture soundtrack, radiohead
> 
> When my time comes around  
> Lay me gently in the cold dark earth  
> No grave can hold my body down  
> I'll crawl home to her  
> \-- work song, hozier

Sarah said: “ _Go to Hell, Helena_!”

So Helena went.

It wasn’t so much a decision on her part as it was a death sentence. In a burning instant, Helena’s flesh tore open and turned shimmering pink, as though it were rubbed raw by salt grit. Then she was gone.

For the better part of an hour, Sarah wandered around the empty warehouse, looking for Helena, unsure of what she’d find. Part of her hoped not to find her—hoped that the monster in her sister had simply ceased to exist, admitted its fault and bid adieu, collapsing its body like a set of tent poles, ready to set up somewhere new. Part of her despaired at the expression Helena had made in that moment—mixed somewhere between adoration and terror.

She fingered the charcoal figures on the wall in hopes that their silent, stiff pantomime would clue her in to the truth. Helena didn’t go to Hell. For starters, Sarah didn’t even believe in Hell not to mention the fact that it could be simply _gotten_ to on demand. With every pillar she turned, she expected to find Helena crouched there with a familiar, jutting grin that made her jaw look as though it were hiding extra rows of teeth.

Eventually, there was nothing left to do but forget. What else was there to do? Fall onto her knees and plead with a God she didn’t believe in to bring her monstrous sister back from the depths of Hell—for what? To do what—tread in a confusing world and succumb to her old ways? Would she suffer, beg, and break until Sarah was forced to kill her again? No, that wasn’t an option.

So she moved on and moved out, taking what little family she could scramble together with her. She shoved and kicked Helena to the corners of her mind and turned her back on the rest. In the gentle intervals of silence when her brother and daughter slept, she struggled to keep her mind as searing and blank as the sun, or a spotless blue sky. She tried not to remember the gentle, lilting way Helena coveted her name, and all words associated with her—or the way she whispered: ‘ _You care_ ,’ and ‘ _I love you_.’

She succeeded sometimes—mostly when she was with Cal. He managed to fill her mind with tangible things like beer and sex, plaid shirts and cool white sheets, the coo of chickens in the early morning.

 

That was until one day, while Kira was feeding the chickens, Sarah saw a runt among the flock and watched—with increasing anxiety—as the poor thing tried to edge into the mass of pecking hens to get a handful of food. Without thinking, she’d picked her up and clutched her close to the chest, kissing the dagger-ends of broken feathers along the back of her neck.

She stroked the hen mindlessly, absorbing the bucks and kicks she gave to her side in attempt to get away. The rest of the hens had already molted for spring and were equipped with new suits of gorgeous feathers, but this one was still molting. The top of her head was flushed with under feather fluff that cut off abruptly upon the start of her neck and disintegrated from there. All along her back, the flesh was raised, raw with the bloodied stubs of emerging feathers, and pocked by pecking wounds. Her comb was nothing more than a mass of scab and blood, having been pecked to a stump by the others.

The hen had kept squirming and wriggling in her hands, trying to get free until she held a handful of scratch beneath its beak. Then it’d settled on her lap, cooing and clucking happily, before dozing to sleep.

When Sarah looked up, she found Kira watching her at a distance. Her face was smooth and blank, almost uncaring, but her knuckles glared white beneath the sun. It seemed as though Kira might throw the pail at her, but she placed it gently on the ground instead and brushed the dust from her hands.  

“See, she just needed your help,” she said.

Behind those doe-like eyes was a deep and silent knowledge, coupled with judgement. Sarah couldn’t speak so she swallowed her tears and stroked the hen’s featherless back until her fingertips were rubbed raw by its jagged ends.

“She’d have suffered whether I loved her or not,” Sarah rasped in reply, unsure of her own words.

Seeming to realize that silence was the best response, Kira left without another word. Still, she placed the bucket of scratch by her mother’s side so that every time the ragged hen roused from her dreams, agitated by some hidden thought, Sarah could scoop another pile for her.

***

Helena came back to her seven days later—or maybe weeks—very little memory of that time was preserved. Fragments occasionally visited her mind as warping nightmares, or useless sensory memory, such as the way her ears had popped and fizzled in her head as she screamed, distorting Helena’s first words.

She remembered the fragile way Helena’s heart had patted against her chest, like a bee against the lip of a flower petal. It had been so strange to feel, knowing that the woman who clutched to her chest had escaped something impossible. She was nearly a militant figure, wearing the tattered remains of a wedding dress like a suit of armor, emblazoned with the gore of a monster.  

Sarah was hanging by her clasped wrists with her useless knees bowed beneath her, listening to her sister’s tapping heartbeat. Ribbon scars would weave along her wrists in place of the zip ties, paling with each year, until they shimmered like snow.

Later, shards of conversation would return to her.

 _Helena—what are you doing here_?! Her voice had scraped against the back of her throat like a trowel, gleaning blood and flesh with each word. Still, her voice had only murmured distantly, as though behind a glass, while her ears bubbled with blood.

 _I climbed_.

***

 

She remembered the car ride home best. The streets faded into a blur of bulbous lights while the sky overhead was pitch black, like an open mouth. Sarah was folded into the passenger seat with a beige blanket thrown over her lap. She doubted Helena knew the way to Felix’s apartment, but she didn’t seem to mind winding through the network of streets and intersections, roundabouts, and highways.

In the silence, she judged the worth of apology.  At this point, it would only appear as an empty precursor of words hoping to trigger forgiveness. Then again, silence seemed even more dangerous—here, with the infinite universe squeezed inside the metal frames of her car. 

Their shared breath pressed up against the edges of the glass and began to obscure the outside world in a misted blur. Sarah’s head lolled sideways along the car window, catching the murmuring vibrations from the outside, when Helena broke the silence.

“You should eat,” Helena said, glancing out the windshield. “What was the name of that diner, Sarah—do you remember?”

“Jack’s Diner,” she murmured. “But I’ve nothing to pay for it.”

“That won’t be necessary.”

Sarah glanced up at the strange rasp of Helena’s tone and examined her face. A streetlamp caught her eye in an exited state, glimmering with an extra sheen, but her face was loose and unsmiling. The yellow beam expanded over her face and passed shortly, leaving an even deeper shadow than before. 

“Are you hungry?” Sarah asked.

At the question, Helena’s face twitched into an expression of starved longing and she tucked her lips in as though she were afraid they’d reel back and release something insatiable. She shrugged instead.

“Don’t think so,” she said. The fabric of her dress tore a little more with the movement of her shoulders, ripping with a sound that resembled the maddening row of an empty stomach.

A deep silence followed in its place. Sarah grasped the blanket and held it closer to her chest, glancing about the car for a distraction.

“What’s with the wedding dress?” She asked and immediately regretted it.

Helena frowned slightly, chewing the inside of her lips.

“I don’t remember,” she said. “It happened after.”

“After you got out?” Sarah struggled to find her words. She couldn’t bring herself to name the place even now, it was too inconceivable. “So you mustn’t have been—there—long.”

“Long enough,” Helena murmured. “Lifetimes.”

Sarah watched Helena’s gaze slide toward her in the rearview mirror. They couldn’t quite meet eyes.  

Again, Sarah felt an apology weigh on her tongue drunkenly, wanting to be spoken for the mere pleasure of it.

The car turned onto another corner, where a shopping cart lay overturned in a dark corner park. Inside its cage laid a pile of abandoned wrappings and shattered glass. Out of its four upturned legs, there was only one wheel still intact on its axis. It turned at an oblique angle as though it were waving at them.

She watched as Helena wound deeper into the labyrinth of streets and felt a shroud of anxiety wrap tightly around her. There was something wrong with Helena. Something she couldn’t recognize fully. Her face was wide and impassive, hiding whatever shifting thing that shivered behind the hood of bone.

Amongst other things, she noticed that Helena’s knuckles were unusually white compared to the film of blood caked onto her hands and realized that they were clenched tight on the steering wheel. It seemed as though she were using every ounce of energy just to keep from slipping through the walls of the car. The wedding dress had been torn in strange, incomprehensible angles, worn by the tear of limbs that could never exist. The fringed lace along her back had large gaping holes where embroidered angels had once laid.

The true horror lay beneath the fabric, where the skin was raw and prickled with the impression of what must’ve been a hundred needles set underneath. Every so often, the needles would shift with the _click_ of set teeth—and that’s when she noticed it: the darkness behind that could not possibly belong to the shadows. It lay behind Helena’s shoulders as though hinged by a set of hooks and pulleys.

Hypnotized, Sarah reached to touch it. Though she saw nothing, her hand found purchase on something that felt velvet and soft. Then, she felt the stirring of a pulse and tore her hands away at once.

“Helena… _Oh God_ ,” Sarah said and clasped a hand over her mouth.

“God had nothing to do with it,” Helena murmured. “These are yours.”

“I’m going to puke, Helena—stop the car!” Sarah said and gagged as she spoke.

After turning another corner, Helena slowed to a stop and parked in the shadow between streetlamps. Sarah leaped from the car and landed on her knees in the grass. Her hands sunk deep into the mud, where it prickled her flesh. The shoots of grass weaved together across the top of her hands, yearning to pull her under.   

She screamed and tore her hands away as the blades writhed and reached for her like hands.

“Sorry,” Helena said and took a step backwards off the grass and onto the street. At once, the grass became limp and passive, settling into the earth solidly.

“I don’t understand any of this,” Sarah said.  Tears streaked her cheeks and a low ringing had settled in her ears.

“Look at me,” Helena said softly. Sarah took a deep breath and turned over her shoulder.

In the clasp of darkness between the streetlamps, a pair of wraithlike wings framed Helena’s body. They could almost resemble the broken-feathered wings she’d seen from before, except that they were transparent and merely covered the air, like a sheet. The world shimmered darkly beneath their limpid screen—visible, and yet, unreachable.

“Why did you save me? You should hate me,” Sarah said. Her voice bottomed out, despairing.

Seeing this, she knelt beside Sarah so that their foreheads were mere inches apart. Her face was consumed with a starved, loving look.

“Hate you? Never,” Helena said. “You are the light.”

Crouching like this, she pressed closer to Sarah, careful not to push her off balance. The ground beneath them squirmed with life. Her temple nuzzled under Sarah’s chin, like before. Sarah lifted her chin slightly, nearly accepting the embrace, and watched the sky.

“What does that make you?” She breathed, afraid of the answer. The sky was pocked with constellations of light. She could feel Helena’s heartbeat against her neck, conjoined with her own racing pulse.

“Everything else.”

***

After a time, they returned to the car. Sarah opted to drive and pierced the labyrinth of streets by daybreak, parking in the alleyway where Felix lived just as the edge of dawn approached.

Sarah watched as a finger of light passed over Helena’s forehead. Her wings recoiled from the light and vanished with a twisting flicker of movement. The light was searing and white at first and became dappled by hues of pink and orange as the sun rolled over the horizon like a plate of red clay.

Affected by this, Helena’s face smoothed over calmly, the muscles underneath knitting together subtly, and her eyes became hooded. She stared blindly over the horizon until a subtle smile pulled over her lips. Then she turned her head and started at the sight of Sarah, as though she expected to be alone.  

Her eyes passed over Sarah curiously and then filled with worry.

“Sarah, you’re bleeding,” she said. “Are you alright?”

Silence consumed the space between them. Helena noticed that Sarah was not covered in her own blood and her eyes calmed somewhat. She reached forward and began to fiddle with the radio. Music lurched in the spaces between static, penetrating an endless ocean of white noise.

“You don't remember anything?” Sarah asked. "Look down at your hands."

Helena did and found them covered in blood. At once, her expression knitted together into one of horror, her breath hitched high-up in her throat, and her hands shook violently. The music station she'd switched to disintegrated into static once more, syncing with the notes of panic in her breath.

"What did I do?" Helena asked with a small, fragile voice.

At once, Sarah grabbed the blanket she’d worn earlier from the back seat and threw it over Helena, tucking it over every blood-stained piece of her. Then she grabbed the back of Helena’s head and pulled it into the shadowed crook of her neck, careful to avoid the space behind her shoulders. 

There was nothing Sarah could say that would make sense to Helena. She could hardly understand it herself. All that she could do was wait and wonder about the gaps of time Helena would never be able to remember, the intervals where she'd be vulnerable to the world. Confused and blinded by the light, with all memory of what she'd become wiped from the slate of her mind. As powerful as she was, she was still so vulnerable.

Sarah's hand rubbed circles into the back of her neck until the skin became nettled with the tips of emerging feathers. It felt as though her wings were clamoring to meet her palm. 

Eventually, Helena’s breathing slowed and she slumped against Sarah’s side, brought back to herself. There was a mutual need between them now. They both knew that the moment Sarah drew back, Helena would be like a newborn lamb, open to the elements, ambling on knocking knees and unfamiliar flesh. 

“Shh, shh, I’m here now,” Sarah said. “I’ll take care of you.”

Helena's hands grasped Sarah's shirt desperately, holding tight, like a child. 

"I'm ready," she whispered. 

Grabbing Helena's hand, she opened the car door and stepped out into the light. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Comment & Kudos if you enjoyed!
> 
> I wrote this as a warm-up and it sucked up my entire evening, go figure.


End file.
